We’re about to do a new Xena release at work, but before that happens I need to (somehow) create a Windows binary of readpst (from libpst) to normalise Outlook PST files. Normally I’d just do it under cygwin, but as of version 0.6.x that requires the cygwin server to be installed and running on the client’s machine (which introduces a whole new level of pain).

We have a native build of readpst from before I worked there, but no-one on “the Google” appears to know how to build it. It’s certainly not my strong point! It’s starting to get tricky..

12 Responses to “Build libpst for Windows?”

I have no idea about the question, but I’d like to note that Microsoft have committed to documenting the PST file format(s) (after more than a few people asked). It looks like if you are on the “nice” list (and not on the “naughty” list), you can get some pre-release stuff.

Thanks for the suggestion. We get the Microsoft guys coming around every now and then trying to get us to use their technologies. We’ve asked for information on data formats (specifically PST actually, because previously libpst couldn’t read files from Outlook 2003 and later) a number of times, and it keeps getting promised but never delivered.

I think recently Mike had a conversation with them and apparently they are releasing a whole bunch of PST doco over the next few years, in stages. One of the first is how to read the files, which is all we need. Still, in light of that being some ways away and me needing to release Xena this week, if I can get readpst going it will be useful

It’ll certainly be interesting to see what comes out of that documentation release, though.

Thanks again for the suggestion. I might double check where it’s up to and see if some data format stuff is out yet.

I use the mingw32 packages on Debian/Ubuntu to compile win32 binaries for libsndfile (I also run the test suite under Wine). For 64 bit windows i’ve built a cross-compiler from the mingw-w64.sf.net sources.

Hi, i tried all the tips posted here, used fedora, ubuntu, cygwin with cygserver, also the command line mingw32-configure && make, ./configure –host=i686-pc-mingw32 && make.
The compiling starts great, but almost in the end, it returns error “checking for iconv… no, consider installing GNU libiconv”.

Could not link test program to Python. Maybe the main Python library has been
installed in some non-standard library path. If so, pass it to configure,
via the LDFLAGS environment variable.
Example: ./configure LDFLAGS=”-L/usr/non-standard-path/python/lib”
============================================================================
ERROR!
You probably have to install the development version of the Python package
for your distribution. The exact name of this package varies among them.
============================================================================

checking for a version of Python >= ‘2.1.0’… yes
checking for a version of Python 2.7… yes
checking for the distutils Python package… yes
checking for Python include path… -I/usr/include/python2.7
checking for Python library path… -L/usr/lib -lpython2.7
checking for Python site-packages path… /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages
checking python extra libraries… -lpthread -ldl -lutil
checking python extra linking flags… -Xlinker -export-dynamic
checking consistency of all components of python development environment… no
configure: error: in `/home/myprofile/libpst':
configure: error:
Could not link test program to Python. Maybe the main Python library has been
installed in some non-standard library path. If so, pass it to configure,
via the LDFLAGS environment variable.
Example: ./configure LDFLAGS=”-L/usr/non-standard-path/python/lib”
============================================================================
ERROR!
You probably have to install the development version of the Python package
for your distribution. The exact name of this package varies among them.
============================================================================